COUNTER

September 29, 2005

IRANIAN GAYS URGENTLY APPEAL FOR HELP

The Persian Gay and Lesbian Organization (PGLO) has appealed to North American activists for help in mobilizing support for their campaign against the vicious, lethal, anti-gay crackdown taking place in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The anti-gay pogrom in Iran includes arrests and torture of gay people, executions of gay Iranians on trumped up charges, and a well-organized Internet entrapment campaign by Iran's religious sex police that is ensnaring gay Iranians daily.

In his latest e-mail sent to me today from Turkey, the secretary of the PGLO's Human Rights Commission, Arsham Parsi, wrote: "Dear Doug, Would you please introduce PGLO to your activist friends and groups and organizations? We need it, we are going to make a big campaign. We need their e-mail addresses. We reach out our hands of need to you!"

The PGLO is an outgrowth of an earlier, smaller Iranian gay group called Rainbow, which first organized in 2002. But PGLO, in its current form, has existed only since 2004. "We are a young team yet," said Parsi in a telephone interview. With secretariats in Norway and Turkey, the PGLO claims a mailing list of over 29,000 Iranians. It maintains a trilingual website in Persian, German, and English. PGLO conducts educational and mutual aide activities inside Iran, and provides support for Iranian gays who have escaped from the Islamic Republic -- the world's largest religious prison -- and tries to help them obtain asylum in a country where they won't be persecuted for who and how they love.

PGLO edits a monthly magazine in Persian, Cheragh (cover at right), and produces Persian-language radio programs for webcast -- a dozen so far -- which are beamed into Iran on the Internet and redistributed there on cassettes. To give American readers some sense of the content of these PGLO productions, I asked my invaluable Persian translator -- the Iranian-American Dr. Houman Sarshar, a psychotherapist by profession who has been of enormous help to me in my reporting on the tragic persecution of Iranian gays by their government -- to read the magazine and listen to the webcasts. He reports: "Both the magazine and the webcasts are focused predominantly on activism. The last issue of Cheragh is about 35 pdf pages. It is fairly substantial in terms of material. Both the magazine and the webcasts deal mostly with legal, social, and ethnographic issues concerning the Iranian gay and lesbian community."

Dr. Sarshar adds, "They also have a strong teaching undertone: teaching about safe sex; translating segments from self-help books and articles about coming out, dealing with the family after you do, etc. The radio programs I've listened to in passing, are mostly talk radio programs. I guess the best way to put it is that both the 'zine and the Internet radio programs are essentially aiming to raise consciousness about the state of homosexuality in Iran today. But their primary focus is definitely legal matters and activism around the absence of the gay rights in Iran today, and the horrible persecutions gay people face today in the Islamic Republic."

Parsi, PGLO's human rights secretary -- who has also been of great help to me in my reporting on Iran -- has been granted asylum in Canada, and is moving there from Turkey in December to establish a PGLO secretariat. (Turkey, whose government -- after eight decades of secular rule -- is now controlled by an Islamist political party, is becoming increasingly hostile to gays, and Turkey is now in the process of banning gay groups. So it's not the best place for an Iranian gay group to operate in.)

The PGLO and Parsi will need material and political help -- both in Canada and from the U.S. -- in setting up the PGLO secretariat when Parsi arrives in Canada. And he pleads with North American activists in both countries to add their names to the PGLO e-mail list so that the group can keep them informed of the developing gay tragedy in Iran, receive alerts when protests are mobilized, and help secure asylum and support for fleeing Iranian gays. The PGLO says, "Please do not leave us alone and try to be our everyday supporters and friends. Hoping for the day, when homosexuality does not carry social contempts and hate any more and would be accepted as a social fact, we ask you to join us and stay with us to struggle for reaching this vital goal.We need your supports and the warmth of your hands."

If you want to express your solidarity with the Iranian LGBT community, individuals as well as organizations are asked to send an e-mail to the PGLO at hrc@pglo.org and join their mailing list. And if you are in a position to make a financial contribution, you may do so by bank transfer to the PGLO bank account in Turkey: Bank Name: KOC BANK; USD. Account NO.: 422 65 193; Branch Code: 975 Turkey

THE CASE OF AMIR, THE 22-YEAR-0LD IRANIAN TORTURE VICTIM (photo at left), who escaped from Iran to Turkey last month to tell of his ordeal and of the unfolding gay tragedy in Iran, is getting world-wide attention. My interview with Amir for New York's Gay City News, has been reprinted in the L.A. Weekly's latest issue, as well as in the new issue of the Boston gay weekly Bay Windows. The Amir interview will also be published this week in daily newspapers in Sydney, Australia and in Berlin (there are cases of gay Iranians facing deportation in both Germany and Australia), and has been been prominently featured on websites and blogs in many countries, from France to Sri Lanka to Iran. Quite a few DIRELAND readers have already offered financial assistance to the penniless young Amir, who is currently seeking asylum in a gay-friendly country. Anyone wishing to help Amir concretely -- either with financial help or in resettlement support -- may do so through the PGLO's Turkish secretariat and Arsham Parsi (who is hosting Amir in Turkey) by e-mailing hrc@pglo.org.

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